Many advertisers pay to have their advertisements featured via a set-top box (STB) FOR display of along with regularly scheduled television content, on demand programming and premium broadcasting. The advertisement may include details regarding the product or service, contact information such as a phone number or web address of the advertiser, pricing information and other details intended to drive viewer interest in the product or service. While television advertising has the potential to reach millions of viewers, the advertiser is usually limited in their ability to understand the effectiveness of the advertisement, especially as it pertains to viewers contacting the advertiser in response to the advertisement. Unfortunately, relevant data for correlating the viewer's contact activity regarding the product or service—i.e., placement of a phone call or accessing of a website—with actual consumption of the advertisement by the viewer is not available.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that provides flexible, efficient techniques to enable advertisers to correlate a communication session with an amount of consumption of the advertisement by a viewer.